The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Kagurabachi

What's It About? 

Chihiro Rokuhira's father, Kunishige, is the most famous swordsmith in the land. Thanks to his six enchanted blades, the war that has been gripping the nation ends, and peaceful days follow. After the war, he retrieves all six blades and hides them in the cellar of his workshop—but sorcerers raid his home and leave Kunishige dead in front of Chihiro. Many years later, Chihiro wields Kunishige's seventh and final enchanted blade on a mission to retrieve the stolen swords!

As a young boy, Chihiro trains every day under his father to become a swordsmith. Although different in temperament, the two spend peaceful days laughing and working together. But one day, tragedy strikes… Now Chihiro burns with hatred and sets out to exact revenge. Following clues left behind by a ruthless yakuza organization, Chihiro confronts the Hishaku, a deadly group of sorcerers that may be behind his father's murder!

Kagurabachi has a story and art by Takeru Hokazono, with English translation by Camellia Nieh. This volume was lettered by Phil Christie. Published by Viz Media (November 5, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Hype cycles, especially in the modern memetic landscape, can be funny. Before it had even come out, expectant readers of Kagurabachi had only half-jokingly hailed it as the new Chosen One of Shonen Jump. The irony was hearing that, as it went on, Kagurabachi did turn out to be a pretty cool manga, even if it wasn't the first series ever to make a Kagurabillion dollars. So now that its first collected volume is out in English and I've tried it for myself, what's the verdict?

This is the first volume of a Shonen Jump battle manga. It's not like it's aggressive in its archetypical sensibilities. I appreciate Takeru Hokazono respecting the audience's eye for storytelling tropes, knowing that readers can figure out that Chihiro's cool, kind dad is 200% not going to make it past the opening chapter. So he just cuts to the present with Chihiro having been orphaned, going out for revenge, and the audience can understand why. It's conducive to the comic's core charm of seeing dudes get cut up.

However, being the opening volume of an action epic like this still necessitates some initiating clunkiness. World-building details about how the magic swords work, or tagalong kid Char's heritage and how she feels about it just get vomited up at opportune moments because that's when readers need the information. It can feel frustratingly amateur, especially compared to Hokazono demonstrating how strong his visual storytelling can be. Sequences like an enemy walking into a restaurant in the background while Chihiro and Char are talking are clever in a low-key way. And there's a great sense of three-dimensionality to the fights, enhancing Hokazono's passion for populating plenty of people and parts flying around in these orgies of violence. That combination of clunky storytelling sensibilities and prioritizing action means that Kagurabachi becomes a bit breathless in the second half of this introductory volume—and that's all that's driving it at this point, as there isn't a ton of character to the characters to let you latch onto them, bar a couple of cute asides from Hinao and Char. But it's good enough as the start to a shonen cut-up, and I can see the appeal of the artistic action spectacle growing as Hokazono further grows into his abilities.

Kagurabachi is a series made of memes. That's the only way I can think to explain its huge popularity – that people voted for it or picked it up because it was a big joke on the internet before it even debuted. Maybe some people like it now unironically, but this first volume? It's pretty rough going.

When I read an action series, I don't want to stop and figure out what's going on in each fight sequence, which is probably Kagurabachi's greatest fault. It suffers from the same problem I've seen in several battle shonen series by new artists, where it looks like the characters are drawn in static poses rather than capturing a moment in time, a single moment amid a dynamic motion. It's frequently hard to follow the cause and effect from panel to panel how one action leads to the next. This is caused partially by the static art, but also because the powers are poorly explained and the page layouts are clunky. The result is stilted and confusing to read.

The downtime bits were similarly stilted and awkward. While I generally found the characters unengaging except for Chihiro's endearingly goofy father, I particularly couldn't stand Char. She encapsulates most qualities I found irritating in fictional children: simultaneously naive, precocious, and prone to getting herself into situations that turn her into a living MacGuffin for Chihiro to rescue, blank-faced. They also dress her in a coat that's way too big for her, emphasizing her huge head and toothpick-like limbs in a way that makes me hate looking at her.

Kagurabachi isn't awful overall. The world design is quite cool, especially with the emphasis on katanas and Japanese architecture, and there is some real creativity in the villains' powers, albeit poorly executed. Chihiro's unchanging facial expression irritated me, but his being driven by anger sets him apart from the generally optimistic cohort of Shonen Jump heroes. It picks up right around the start of the first volume. I can only work with what I see here, and what I see is fine, but seriously lacking in polish.